If your Superdrive or disk drive is on the way out (I think mine is) it can be a real pain to change it, especially if its locked inside a MacBook or MacBook Pro. I personally use my disk drive about twice a year. So when the time comes to get something off a CD it can be a major pain to get something off a CD. However there is a solution to this problem. If you take a look at a MacBook Air, Drive Sharing is available, so all the background code is ready to go, we just need to bring it to life. This post is going to cover the entire method of getting drive sharing to work. If you just want the hack, go to the end of the post.
To enable drive sharing, first go to the computer which will host your DVD. If it is a Mac, you can enable DVD sharing. Go to System Preferences > Sharing and check “DVD or CD Sharing”. If you are on a Windows machine (I feel sorry for you), download this package and install it. Under Control Panel open up “DVD and CD Sharing” and check the box which asks if you want to enable Disc Sharing. The host computer is now set up. To save you some time, you can now insert the DVD you want to share.
Here comes the hack. On a MacBook Air this little preference code is already enabled. On other Macs this isn’t the case. Open up Terminal and type the following two lines, press return after each one. There will be no confirmation from Terminal when you have finished. From MacRumors.
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true
Restart you Mac, when you open Finder again you should see “Remote Disk” in the sidebar (make sure its enabled in Preferences). You can now navigate to the drive as if it was on your own computer. Loading the files takes slightly longer since it has to run over your network. I remember reading somewhere that this wont work over secured Wi-Fi connections, so you have to use a cable for best results.
The Remote Disc option acts like a folder, each drive that is shared will appear as its own entry under “Remote Disk”. This means that you can set up this feature on other Mac’s and share the drives over the network. I personally think this type of trick will be pretty cool if you are in an office environment and constantly handing disks over to each other. If you are really adventurous and have a Mac with lots of USB ports or internal slots (i.e a MacPro) you could make a CD server with lots of disk drives and share each one of them, so every one over a network can access them. However, if it has come to that it may be worth ripping the disk to a disk image and making a ISO server. Fun idea anyway.
Posted in: Internet,Mac,Tutorials
